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Glacial Fluvial Landform
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Material moved by glaciers and subsequently sorted and deposited by streams flowing from the melting ice. The deposits are stratified and may occur in the form of outwash plains, valley trains, deltas, kames, eskers, and kame terraces.


An outcrop of a fluvial deposit (click for bigger image)

Above: An example of a glacial fluvial landform (Duxbury USGS Topographic Quadrangle).

B - Kettle Pond and Bogs formed by blocks of glacial ice that detached from the receding glacier, became covered with fluvial sediments, and later melted forming a basin. The basin either filled with water (kettle pond), filled with organic material (kettle bog), or if it didn't intercept the water table; remained a dry kettle hole.
E - Esker - A long, narrow, sinuous and steep-sided ridge composed of irregularly stratified sand and gravel deposited as the bed of a stream flowing in an ice tunnel within or below the ice (subglacial) or between ice walls on top of the ice (ice channel filling) of a wasting glacier, and left behind as high ground when the ice melted.
H - Head of Outwash (Ice-contact head) - A sloping and sometimes high relief landform composed predominantly of glaciofluvial sediment that delimits a former ice-margin of a relatively static, rapidly wasting glacier. A steep ice-contact slope forms the ice-proximal face of the landform; a more gently sloping surface dips away on the distal slope, if not slumped.
K - Kame - A mound, knob, hummock, or short irregular ridge, composed of stratified sand and gravel deposited by a subglacial stream as a fan or delta at the margin of a melting glacier; by a supraglacial stream in a low place or hole on the surface of the glacier; or as a ponded deposit on the surface or at the margin of stagnant ice.
P - Outwash Plain - An extensive lowland area of coarse textured, glacial fluvial material. An outwash plain is commonly smooth; where pitted, due to melt-out of incorporated ice masses (pitted outwash plain), it is generally low in relief and largely retains it's original gradient.

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